Study: Nearly four-fifths of ‘gender minority’ students have mental health issues
The American Journal of Preventive Medicine says that most gender-minority students report having mental health problems. At the same time, a Johns Hopkins professor says on the child transgender trend: ‘Many will regret this’. He argues that doctors are doing treatment without evidence:
"Many people are doing what amounts to an experiment on these young people without telling them it’s an experiment. I believe that these gender confusions are mostly being driven by psychological and psychosocial problems these people have. They’re going to be in the hands of doctors for the rest of their lives, many of them are going to be sterilized not able to have their own children, and many will regret this. Can you imagine having a life where you need to seek doctors all the time, for everything, just to live? Getting your hormones checked, getting everything checked?"
As I understand it, the problems in the home situation (rampant divorce, et cetera) and the gender-destruction ideology propagated by the schools have exactly the intended effect: gender confusion.
The medical profession does not necessarily dislike this trend because these children can be treated for life with hormones. They are are also good customers for castration surgery. So, it is good business.
All of this is made possible by the relaxation of scientific standards.
The proponents of the anti-natalist ideology like it too, because these children will be unable to have their own children.
The state-controlled school system has now an officially-recognized catastrophic effect on the population and its social structure. The state-controlled school system is rapidly destroying the very population that is funding it.
"Many people are doing what amounts to an experiment on these young people without telling them it’s an experiment. I believe that these gender confusions are mostly being driven by psychological and psychosocial problems these people have. They’re going to be in the hands of doctors for the rest of their lives, many of them are going to be sterilized not able to have their own children, and many will regret this. Can you imagine having a life where you need to seek doctors all the time, for everything, just to live? Getting your hormones checked, getting everything checked?"
As I understand it, the problems in the home situation (rampant divorce, et cetera) and the gender-destruction ideology propagated by the schools have exactly the intended effect: gender confusion.
The medical profession does not necessarily dislike this trend because these children can be treated for life with hormones. They are are also good customers for castration surgery. So, it is good business.
All of this is made possible by the relaxation of scientific standards.
The proponents of the anti-natalist ideology like it too, because these children will be unable to have their own children.
The state-controlled school system has now an officially-recognized catastrophic effect on the population and its social structure. The state-controlled school system is rapidly destroying the very population that is funding it.
Comments (222)
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(19)30219-3/abstract
The actual article does not support your interpretation.
McHugh is not himself without controversy.
You talkin' shite.
The abstract doesn't cover all what a paper says, so I don't know everything what Ketchen Lipson et al say.
From the abstract on the link you gave:
What I find very disturbing are the statistics here: 45% and 78%. If nearly every second person has mental issues, then perhaps one should define at least some of these issues as normal behaviour among people. Every second student isn't going to attempt suicide or go insane. (Or, perhaps I'm wrong and vast segment of American students are totally off their rockers and truly need their safe spaces.)
He does not literally say it, but it is obvious what he means. It is incredible how "critical thinking" is supposedly encouraged in state-controlled schools, but not "critical thinking" about the schools themselves. Centralization leads to corruption, and 150+ years of centralization of the schools has clearly led to an astonishing level of corruption, which is even going to destroy society as a whole.
Yeah, they're fucked. But not for the reasons you give.
And actually it sounds totally logical. No matter how tolerant the society is, to be in a gender minority will likely cause bit of difficulty among people and some anxieties.
The only minority that people don't have any problem belonging to is to be rich. And even with this minority, those being born to prosperity it can be problematic.
I believe that every centralized system will become corrupt and will turn on its users. Now, I agree that this belief is quite ideological. Decentralization is a core belief in the cryptocurrency world:
[i]The Danger of Centralization
The internet should be decentralized. The credit industry should be decentralized. P2P markets should be decentralized. Identity should be decentralized. Loans should be decentralized. Anything that has a trusted 3rd party act a middle man without adding value should be replaced with a decentralized system.[/i]
Therefore, for ideological reasons, I am also firmly opposed to any centralized education system. I am convinced that centralization in education will go badly wrong. It will go wronger and wronger until it destroys the very society itself that feeds it with students and money, just like the centralized banking is doing by destroying its customers and even society at large.
There are lots of idiosyncratic choices that are made by a school, for which various alternatives are actually viable. It is utterly wrong to get all the schools to give the same idiosyncratic answer. This only happens because the choice itself has been centralized. It is dangerous to do that. There should be alternatives, and with a state-controlled system monopoly, there are no alternatives.
In the end, I do not even care about what the symptoms will be of destruction caused by a centralized education system. I believe that it will always end up destroying itself, regardless of how exactly it does that, simply, because of the centralization itself.
What is concerning to me is the astronomical rate of suicide contemplation for both Veterans and those who are in the gender minority.
I just don't know if there is a way to distinguish between the mental illness resulting from combat, something we choose to put ourselves at increased risk for and a mental illness resulting from something that we do not choose such as ones gender.
Good questions.
Also, re this: "They’re going to be in the hands of doctors for the rest of their lives . . . Can you imagine having a life where you need to seek doctors all the time, for everything . . . getting everything checked?" Isn't that what we keep being told we need to do? Go for regular check-ups, prostate exams, breast exams, colonoscopies, etc. etc.?
I've always had hobbies, studies and jobs where men & women joined in equally. My cousin when a boy liked girly dolls for some years, afterwards married a lady, they had a happy marriage.
People didn't pass personal remarks about each other, didn't look in the mirror much and the women didn't use much makeup (the makeup sellers starved).
Now if it is sometimes argued gender is different from sex, this leaves additional question marks as to categories.
Above all I want to comment that, saying that an even higher proportion of these people are quivering wrecks, than everyone else, merely illustrates what a high proportion of the rest of us are having our nerves shredded as well. I for example am now scared rigid because politics and commerce tell me every day that I haven't got a mind. Some days I "keep myself sane" some days it "gets to me".
This is the trend from ideologically motivated corps whether in schools or anywhere. The immediate context can get salami sliced between "gender", economic vulnerability, race relations, cultural deprivation, you name it.
There is even an ideology that you have to finnick about everybody else's personal appearance.
So, this study doesn't grind anybody's axes but neither does it by any means disprove concerns.
An emotionally frail young person goes to see officialdom, officialdom tells them they don't worry enough and ought to worry more, et voila.
It is. You can be a masculine woman i.e tomboy and/or an effeminate man i.e bobcat.
One could say that ALL gender minority students have mental health problems, if lacking a firm and biologically consistent gender identity is a disorder. I tend to view gender confusion or gender fluidity as a disorder --not as a mere variation. This is not a popular view in many circles; it is probably not a popular view here.
There is variation in sexual behavior, of course. Sexual orientation, for instance, ranges between exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality. Orientation, however, is not the same as gender confusion. Persons who are in the middle of the hetero-homo distribution are not confused about their sexual identity.
A very small portion of the population are sexually ambiguous from birth. They are a category apart from what we are discussing here. A larger portion (less than 1% of the population) express varying degrees of gender ambiguity. That they think they are something other than what their physical body says they are is a significant delusion. It seems like this delusion is becoming more common, which suggests that the act of expressing gender confusion may be a learned behavior and a front for some other neuroticism.
Physical treatment for a psychological disorder would be as wrong as lobotomies. Young children, for instance, should not be allowed to cross-dress for school; they should not be allowed to claim they are the opposite gender than their biology indicates and need to use toilets of the opposite gender. And they should not be given hormones of the opposite sex.
Needless to say, children should not be punished for exhibiting delusory ideas. Delusions should be overcome, not punished.
Yes, and these aren't examples of gender confusion either.
Quoting Bitter Crank
You don't see a contradiction here?
If only moral condemnation would snap people upright, you'd be well on your way to a cure, right?
I don't see a contradiction unless you equate denial of the right to live out one's delusions as punishment.
I don't care so much about cross dressing because there are no long term consequences from wearing ill fitted clothing. I do object to hormonal therapies and genital surgeries for the young because the statistics do show many change their minds as they age. Even among the adults who choose hrt and surgery, unless the statistics show a decrease in depression and suicide (which they don't), I'd be as opposed to it as I would any useless medical procedure.
SO the utter misery induced by forcing a child to wear gendered clothing doesn't count?
Source?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/
"Conclusions
Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group."
https://www.transgendertrend.com/children-change-minds/
"Ten studies have been conducted looking at whether gender dysphoria persists throughout childhood. On average 80% of children change their minds and do not continue into adulthood as transgender. Some of these studies are very old, the first being published in 1968 and others in the 1980s. This was during a time when being transgender was not accepted as widely in society as it is now so it can be argued that this may have influenced many to change their minds. An analysis of all published studies can be seen here.
However, the most recent study published in 2013 confirms once again that gender dysphoria does not persist in most children past puberty. "
The first article is the NIH study itself. The second provides links to all studies.
If you are committed to the idea that this treatment should be judged by its medical efficacy, then you have to be opposed to it. If this is a right to expression and liberty issue, you might not care what the studies say. I'd think though, even if it's the latter, you might wish to withhold such choices from children.
This contention raises a few interesting questions. Like, why does clothing matter so much? Why would identity be contingent on clothing expression? And why is clothing gendered in the first place?
Increasingly, we view only "women's clothing" as gendered. Women can wear, I think, anything a man wears, and not be considered necessarily "cross-dressing." That's in part because patriarchy determines everything male as the standard or normal thing, and everything female as "other." But in any case, it means that we're really only talking about mtf and not ftm here.
I don't want to call it shallow for gender minorities of any kind to worry about clothing, but I do think it's creating wrong priorities. It suggests that being a woman/man is about clothing. But, even is the socially constructed view of gender, gender is so much bigger than that.
That being said, I agree with Hanover that people should be allowed to dress in what fashion they choose. But that surgeries and hormone therapies are too permanent and invasive to be options for young people. You can easily change a shirt, but you can't grow back body parts.
As to the OP, I think the most obvious response is "correlation does not equal causation." There are many things about gender minority's lives that could contribute to mental health issues that might go away in a more tolerant world.
And it is possible that there are actually mentally ill people, who perhaps aren't transgender, who are drawn to that idea because they hope it'll be an easy fix for their deeper problems. That does not mean that this applies to all or even the majority of gender minorities.
this figure is obtained by assuming that every one who was untraceable changed their mind.
Biased source.
not that kids change their mind.
No problem in my mind...
Or just tell them the truth like we do anorexic patients. You're not fat, so stop trying to use extreme methods of losing weight. You're not a woman, you're a man, so you dont need to go to a fixture to get cut up and have to wear a stent for the rest of your life to keep the wound between your legs open.
Ah, well, I guess you're applying the motto "when at first you fail, try and try and try again"?
Here we are talking about quite young children deciding they are the opposite gender and demanding to wear clothes (or behave) in the manner of the opposite sex. Young children don't go clothes shopping by themselves (one would hope) so how does this problem arise? By the parents providing the clothing the child wanted to wear. Why would an adult take their 6 year old's clothing preferences as a directive, let alone something as major and complex as identity?
So forcing a child of eight to wear boy's uniform at school to the point where she is suicidal is just correcting a bit of delusional defiance.
Here we are talking about quite young children deciding they are the opposite gender and demanding to wear clothes (or behave) in the manner of the opposite sex. Young children don't go clothes shopping by themselves (one would hope) so how does this problem arise? By the parents providing the clothing the child wanted to wear. Why would an adult take their 6 year old's clothing preferences as a directive, let alone something as major and complex as identity?
We do not (or at least we should not) allow children to marry, have sex with whomever they wish, smoke, drink, use recreational drugs, chew tobacco, play with guns, and so forth. Children are expected to defer such activities until they are 'of age' like, 16, 17, 18 to 21. It is reasonable for people to defer some behaviors and delusions until they are old enough to manage the complexities which come with these activities.
I have doubts about transsexualism, gender dysphoria, and so on, when these terms are applied to adults. Many more doubts when applied to children.
I find it odd that you of all those here are happy to have the contents of one's underpants determine one's social role.
Right, but at the same time, why is identity wrapped up with the shape and style of one's underpants (and other garments)?
LOL. It isn't okay, but transgenders reinforce those social roles everytime they claim wearing a dress makes them a woman and then attempts to change what is in their underpants. Why can't a man wear a skirt and still be a man?
There isn't a problem for a man to wear a skirt or earrings or have long hair and still be a man. The problem arises when they claim to be a woman because of these things.
Children that young aren't making decisions about their gender. It is their parents. Just look at the case of Dr. Money who was the originator of the idea that gender is a social construction. He tried to force his male patient into being a girl but he knew he wasn't and it ended up messing him up to the point where he committed suicide.
Seems likely.
(1) Acceptance of gender non-conformity.
=> (2) Parents accept gender non-conformity
=>(3) Children interested in gender reassignment are encouraged to transition early.
=>(4) Lifelong mental scarring.
I mean, what even is this? (1=>2) makes sense, as general public perception changing is likely to change the perception of parents (since they're part of the public). But (2=>3) is a big step, a major medical intervention like gender reassignment will probably be seen like sterilisation, the procedure is not done until someone is of age. (3=>4) makes some amount of sense assuming gender reassignment was a bad idea for the kid and they were forced into it.
Are people really imagining a world where progressive attitudes towards gender conformity reliably lead to forced gender reassignment in kids? This is Fox News death panel crap.
I think the more enlightened attitude is to allow kids to wear whatever clothes or make up they like, and discuss gender and gender identity with them, in a way that's consistent with what we know about it; that most cases of gender identity issues resolve after adolescence without surgery, that gender dysphoria is unpleasant (even if diagnostically/etiologically problematic) but should not be used reductively to gainsay the psychological effects of marginalisation that trans and gender non-conforming people face.
Being gay or lesbian isn't a form of being transgendered.
The contents of our costumes (underpants and all) have a lot to do with determining who/what/how we are. As for me, I have never thought it was possible for me, or any one else, "to be anything we want to be". There were many things that I might wanted to have been but there were constraints preventing fulfillment. That's just life. There are possibilities and potentials that we can pursue, sure, but we encounter hard constraints. No matter how much I might have wanted to be a heavy-weight boxer, I didn't have the build for that. I might have wanted to be an astrophysicist. I just didn't get an astrophysicist brain. I might have wanted to be a heterosexual macho man, but it wasn't in the cards.
So, there are people who want to want to play the part of the opposite sex. Sure, go ahead WHEN one has the capacity to mastermind the show before one makes one's public debut.
Yes, I believe that's reasonable. However, it's not necessarily what all trangender people want. Some advocate for allowing preteens to start medically transitioning before their natural hormones change them in directions they do not believe they want. I disagree with the whole concept, but I can understand their position.
Hormone therapy's reversible anyway. Easily so. This is the most common treatment, and is given long before the surgical procedure.
Are you sure they're reversible? From a friend who's adult child is transitioning I heard that it causes sterilization. I could be mistaken, however.
"Within a few months of beginning hormone therapy, you must assume that you will become permanently and irreversibly sterile. Some people may maintain a sperm count on hormone therapy, or have their sperm count return after stopping hormone therapy, but you must assume that won’t be the case for you."
https://transcare.ucsf.edu/article/information-estrogen-hormone-therapy
Depends on the type IIRC. I don't think young kids are given the sterilising hormone therapy often, for obvious reasons.
Edit: So yeah, the gender transition hormone therapy isn't reversible if it's pursued for a long time, and will eventually sterilise its recipient; but this isn't the usual course of hormone treatment for kids with gender dysphoria.
I've been reading other websites that also suggest the safety of even puberty suppressing (as opposed to gender-affirming) drugs is unknown and hard to ascertain. Clearly there are problems finding case studies and control group and doing any of the usual double-blind type things. It's kind of like studies about pregnancy and breast-feeding: the consequences are possibly too severe and irreversible for researchers to use people as guinea pigs. Especially since puberty, pregnancy, and breastfeeding are all time-limited.
In the face of a child who is distressed at being forced to take on a male role, to the point of depression and disengagement, you are happy to force her to wear the clothes of a boy?
Remember the Three Questions? A CIS insistence is no use to her, here, now.
Can you define "male role"?
If parents are raising their children in gender-neutral environment then they arent stressing any particular way of dressing as being man or woman because any gender/sex can wear what they want. Children would be raised in a way as to not make a connection with the way you dress and your sex. But that isn't what is happening. These parents are raising them as the opposite sex and the kids have no choice in the matter. As they develop they realize that they don't share the qualities of that sex/gender and this is what caused the mental anguish because they are confused thanks to their parents, not society.
This is just plain wrong. Unless you raise your child on a deserted island without books or music or any other form of human culture, the child is being shaped by society all the time.
If no man is an island, neither are families.
I did so wish, and fulfillment of the wish had to wait years for the arrival of a suitable time and a place. Had the opportunity "to lie with other men" arrived as early as I wished, the experience would most likely have not been good. Was the long delay frustrating? Of course.
With the 'general' child in view we can confidently propose a sensible course of action. Given the case of a particular child, an 8 year old somewhere in Australia, "sensible advice" might not work. We don't know anything about the history of this 8 year old, or what possible solutions might be available. For blanket statements, Saying [I]"eight year olds should wear whatever gendered clothing they want"[/I] seems as ill-advised as saying "eight year olds should never be accommodated on gendered issues." If the choice is suicide vs the girls' pleated plaid outfit then... pleated plaid it is, I suppose. But the pleated plaid option might not work out well in the end, either.
1. physical genitalia (at birth)
2. social role identification (3-11 years)
3. sexual preference (puberty)
The general assumption is that 1 is binary and determines both 2 and 3 in a ‘normal’ human being. Anyone who deviates from this is considered ‘abnormal’ in a variety of value systems. We have been increasing awareness and acceptance of a simple two-dimensional view that includes homosexual preference, but generally maintain that social role identification be irrevocably determined by either 1 or 3.
In reality it is social environment that determines the availability of social roles with which one can identify. Children dress-up and try on roles as diverse as they are given the freedom to: whether that’s doctors and nurses, pirates, princesses, superheroes, dinosaurs, dogs, ducks, etc...
Each time you tell a child they can’t wear that or BE that because they ARE something or someone else, you limit their overall potential. When a child identifies with a social role they’re actively prevented from pursuing, it causes dysphoria. These social role limitations we impose on our children to ‘protect’ them from bullying, etc are in response to the limited social roles we are imposing on our children. The bullying doesn’t come from the children, but is a result of the imposed social environment - influence from parents, teachers, media, etc.
Children don’t need to be told they’re not going to grow up to be a dinosaur. They’re smart enough to work that out for themselves, eventually - as long as we teach them to see the world for what it is. By the same token, they will learn that the clothing they wear can change how people interact with them. They will learn how they feel about that, and that their clothing choices go some way towards choosing the nature of their social interactions, but do not define who they are. If we take away this choice in some respects but not others, if we disallow the choices they make, then what are we teaching them about who they can be?
Society treats the child the way the parents dress and refer to the child. The parents determine how society treats the child.
Just go look ar Dr. Money's experiment. He told the parents to raise the boy as a girl because the boy lost his penis as the result of an accident during circumcision. The parents dressed him as a girl and refer to him as a girl. Society just went along and didnt know any better.
One case is an interesting reason to look further into a subject. It is not proof of anything.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The parents are not all-powerful. The child is still growing up in a world where people are treated differently based on their sex. Unless you're talking about an unusually stupid and incurious child, they pick up on these things.
Guess the application of puberty blockers comes down to the question; does the benefit of suspending puberty for this patient outweigh the possible risks of applying it? Same thing as usual, probably no blanket statement required.
Well, there we kind of have to go back to basic questions about transgenderism.
Like, if gender is based on self-id and not physical attributes, why is changing the physical of such importance as to outweigh possible health risks.
Do you really need to ask those questions when trans people often report that their suffering alleviates somewhat when they perform the role of the appropriate gender and take the appropriate hormones/surgery to modify their body? It'll be a case by case thing; people shouldn't be forced to transition, people who have gender dysphoria as kids should have puberty blockers available but not mandatory (case by case), people who want to transition should be able to (when the circumstances are appropriate and they are able to decide for themselves).
Yes, I do. Because, why only often? Why not always? What is the percentage? Is there a way to tell ahead of time? And on what basis are they happier? Because they actually feel better in their own skin or because other people are nicer when they "pass"? And if the latter, should we be allowing kids to modify their bodies because other people are jerks?
Why is it inappropriate for one child to wear clothes that it's appropriate for a child with different genitals to wear?
The issue isn't that we should accommodate inappropriate behaviour; the issue is that the behaviour isn't inappropriate at all. Nonconforming, perhaps, but not inappropriate.
Why often: there's a trend that trans people's wellbeing improves when they adopt the roles and bodies of the desired gender.
Why not always: individual level variability - in addition to neurological and bodily variability, there's also socio-economic context and socialisation which vary strongly.
What is the percentage that are effected positively: depends on the diagnostic intervention and target demographic, considering that trans people are often receiving mental health therapy in addition to other interventions, the causes of improvement are difficult to isolate (for this and other reasons).
On what basis are they happier: self reports or other outcome indicators typical of long term cohort studies. This is tricky, since you can't isolate the hormone therapy from what causes it to be present, or the social context of the study participants. The relevant contrast there is trans people feel they must transition but cannot or have not, and trans people who feel they must transition and have. Considering no one would take life altering surgery lightly, people who have transitioned are a decent proxy for the latter, and the general non-transitioned (but possibly not non-binary/still sexual binary) population are an ok proxy for the first. If you look at this contrast case you see improvements in wellbeing from transitioning. Whether you see improvements in wellbeing from hormone therapy is a different test case, it seems like we do, though perhaps it's different for non-binary individuals.
Is there a way to tell ahead of time; probably not in all cases, individual level variability is high; there will be heuristics that are applied contextually; like age, effect of treatment, severity of dysphoria. Treat the patient not the ailment applies well here. Diagnostic guidelines say as much too (and there's lots of screening for sex reassignment surgery and hormone therapy!)
If it was required to trace the aetiology of any mental health effecting condition to general patterns in the population before administering any treatment, no treatment would ever be administered for mental health issues. There are screens in place - it's hard to get puberty blockers or hormone therapy. Especially hard for kids.
I don't think there's a responsible, compassionate case to be made that we should try not to answer these very basic questions before proceeding with treatment that is possibly more dangerous than non-medical intervention.
Which is nice, because I'm absolutely not making that case, and neither are the doctors asking the questions!
Can you explain what case you are making then? Cause imho your last post sounded like you did not have answers to those questions but would still endorse selectively allowing underage persons to take on the risk.
Are you under the impression that doctors do not extensively screen the appropriateness of and tailor hormone therapy (and surgical intervention) to gender non-conforming individuals? It's assessed on a case by case basis.
I guess you could phrase it that way.
I think doctors offering transitions to underage persons are probably (in good faith) trying too quick to accommodate transpeople's desires. Which is understandable, but it might not actually be in the best interest of transpeople until we can solve a whole list of medical and metaphysical concerns first.
The metaphysical stuff is funny.
Before trying to treat this person for gender dysphoria and attendant mental health difficulties, forming support and advocacy groups for them, and trying to fight for their social recognition, let us first decide if they actually exist!
Of course they bloomin' do, the clinical questions; how best to treat this patient; are influenced by but are not reducible to questions like what is the aetiology of their condition; and those are influenced by but are not reducible to questions of what is a trans person. The influence goes both ways, of course, and if you want to study the metaphysics of transsexualism, you can learn a lot from studying trans people.
Red herring.
Quoting fdrake
Actually, that's a really important, fundamental question before medicine should be practiced. I mean, unless you know what it is, you can't know all that much about how to treat it, and you risk making things worse.
Isn't that what "inappropriate" means? Nonconforming?
It is inappropriate or appropriate based on the culture you find yourself in. That isn't to say that it is right or wrong. That's just the way it is. What you are physically isn't based on culture. It is based on biology - your ancestral species and your sex. What you wear doesn't change what you are, but it can change the expectations of society because society assumes you are biologically that person and not just dressing up as one. Once society finds out they've been duped, they reject that person. They aren't playing by that society's rules. In order to be accepted, they go about changing their physical form to be as much like that person as possible, but can still never get to the true form and function of something that they just aren't.
Transgenderism reinforces those cultural stereotypes. With transgenderism, wearing skirts and having long hair is what it means to be a woman. Wearing pants and having short hair is what it means to be a man. That isn't what it means to be a man or woman. Men and women can wear a variety of clothes and have different lengths of hair and still be a man or a woman. How different societies enforce these rules varies, but that variation doesn't make one more or less of a man or a woman - that is biology.
The socialist left doesn't seem to realize that gender-neutrality and transgenderism are incompatible ideas. You can't have both in the same culture. Either we change our culture as to not assume that a woman is under that dress and that it is okay for men to wear dresses and still be a man so they don't go do something radical and dangerous to their bodies, OR we change our ideas about mental health and that people can actually be other people in their heads even though their physical form says otherwise.
Seems pretty backwards to me. The only reason we're theorising about the metaphysics of transgenderism is because trans people are becoming more socially recognised and the treatments for them are developing. It's not like the metaphysical questions' a priori nature dictates treatment strategy or social experience; though the metaphysics that accompanies peoples' perceptions of trans (including self perception) is important.
Especially when you have people like here who still believe there's no distinction between birth sex and gender, trans people be damned.
Of course details like "what exactly is transgenderism" determine treatment. It's like the difference between how you'd treat someone with paranoia versus a victim of stalking. Or how you'd treat an obese person trying to lose weight versus an anorexic one. Or treating an ulcer versus Crohn's disease. All these things share symptoms, but are hugely different cases and therefore need different treatments.
If we say transgenderism is being "trapped in the wrong body" we can make a case for physical alterations. If we say transgenderism is just self-id and a social role, then the case for risky medical procedures seems less clear.
For most people there isnt one. The difference is as imaginary as the sex transgenders believe they are. For the transgenders there isn't a difference which is why they attempt to change their sex.
Gender has never defined coherently other than as a synonym for sex. If gender were a social construction then society, not indivuals and their view of themselves, determine gender. Gender would be detrmined collectively, not individually.
I guess what I'm saying is we don't need metaphysical speculation for basic characterisation any more. If the UN has a definition of the term they use for assessing policy/treatment/rights, the basic characterisation of what "transexual' means is already well studied.
There are accompanying definitions of gender identity and gender expression in the link.
Sure, there'll probably be problems in it. But the basic groove the definitions follow is that:
(1) Gender isn't reducible to birth sex, even though it usually aligns with it.
(2) Gender is a social phenomenon whose archetypes are correlated with the sex of bodies.
(3) The expression of gender is intimately bound up with norms of expression of its archetypes, as a social phenomenon relating to the expectations of appearance and actions, this is not surprising.
There's also a resounding lack of 'gender dysphoria' in these basic characterisations, which is a virtue, for a similar reason to homosexuality no longer being a mental illness. For what I imagine is a related reason, the characterisations locate the site of social 'sanctions'; mental and physical abuse; as related to norms of gender expression and not gender identity; can be a man or woman or whatever without abuse for gender identity, you're gonna get abuse when the norms for gender expression are in friction with your gender expression. To wit; trans people aren't mentally ill a lot because they're trans, trans people are mentally ill a lot because society fucks them up.
I'm not saying we should uncritically accept these basic characterisations, to my mind they seem very sensible and cover what seems relevant. What I will say is that I'm usually extremely suspicious that non-acceptance of something resembling this account in its major respects is rooted in a desire for metaphysical accuracy rather than ignorance or prejudice. Out in public it looks like fear of traps, on a philosophy forum it looks like a desire for linguistic or biological decorum, in private it looks like drooling over your dick while guiltwanking on pornhub (which I would link to, but one must have standards).
I don't think it makes any sense to claim that a person looking for metaphysical accuracy is being prejudiced. Some might be, as you suggest, using it as a cover for their prejudice, but you cannot assume that a) all such questions are covers, and b) all true supporters won't question the metaphysics.
In fact, as I have pointed out before, I believe NOT wanting an accurate account of the phenomenon is potentially much more harmful and less supportive than a risk-taking rush to accommodate everything people think they want.
So the definition you present here basically comes down to the latter of my two suggestions earlier: gender is self-id and a social role. In which case, part of the reason trans-people would so desperately want to transition early would be to "pass" more easily and not be the subject of harrassment.
Again, I don't think there's a good case to be made that we should allow teens to modify their bodies because other people are jerks. That runs counter to everything else we try to instill in our children. It gives credence to the suggestion that it is okay to judge someone on their appearance, and that it is the harrassee and not the harrasser who must change.
Sure you do. You are skeptical of so many claims on this forum, yet you aren't skeptical of someone's claim that they are a woman when they were born a man. This is a case of one's skepticism being applied inconsistently, and the reason is because it is a political/religious issue for you, not a scientific one.
Ok, so here "gender" is defined as an identity that is gender atypical. Did you read that over? Gender is an identity that is gender atypical. Sounds like a contradiction to me. How can gender be something that is atypical of gender? Politics.
Quoting fdrake
Here's a completely different definition - one where you just reiterated what I already did - that if gender is a social phenomenon, then gender is defined collectively, not by an individual, which contradicts the idea that gender is an individual identity that a person feels like and can decide for themselves.
I certainly don't think you are prejudiced here! You've been nothing but earnest and exploratory. And I agree that it is important to care about accurately describing transgenderism. Otherwise I would probably not have done basic research about it.
Quoting Artemis
I think one of the best parts about the UN characterisation is that it highlights bodies as social objects, in the regard that they are not just passively immersed in roles and appearances, but roles and appearances play out in them.
For a playful example, I identify as a mathematician. That I've worked in that role is part of it, part of it is a thinking style, part of it is a collection of analogies and codes and heuristics that I partake in, and some of it is being able to make my choices and thoughts and keystrokes/penstrokes align in the right way to make computers do stuff, students learn stuff, or for some other end. These aren't just floating ideas existing in some realm of abstraction; appearances of mathematical competence; I embody versions of them and carry them forth in my day to day life. My body can function as a mathematician, and I currently have that as a social role. Luckily I don't have to just do math.
For a less playful example, I have dissociative disorder. That I've been diagnosed with it and treated for it is part of it, part of it is a thinking style, part of it is a collection of habits and bodily processes that I partake in, and some of it is that my thoughts and body movements align in the right way to... make me unable to move for hours at a time, unpredictably. These aren't just floating ideas existing in some realm of abstraction; appearances of diagnostic indicators formulated from case reports and clinical trials; I embody versions of them and carry them forth in my day to day life. My body can function as a person with dissociative disorder, and I currently have that as a social role. Luckily my social functions do not solely consist in partaking in clinical trials.
Of course there are differences, but I could no more sever mathematical training from my mind than the dissociative disorder. Both atrophy when not exercised, though, and that's a good thing in the latter case and a sorry state of human stupidity in the former case.
For a far more contentious example, I identify as a man, the sex I was born as. That I've been comfortable with the alignment of my birth sex and my gender identity is part of it, part of it is a thinking style, part of it is a collection of habits and bodily process that I partake in (socialisation!), and some of it is that my thoughts and body movements align in the right way to... make me perceive little to no difference between my gender identity and my biological sex. These aren't just floating ideas existing in some realm of abstraction; behavioural indicators correlating with physiology and expression in an anthropologist's notebook; I embody versions of them and carry them forth in my day to day life. My body can function as a man, and I currently have that as a social role. Luckily my social roles do not consist in being an archetype of masculinity.
Of course there are differences, the latter is so fundamental to my being I find it difficult to give it a procedural description because I can't separate myself from it. I can't describe it indifferently as a separate function. My bits have social functions every bit a part of me as the bits themselves, that I don't feel much internal conflict between them and my self concept is difficult to express; distinctions in character are furnished with differences in function rather than identities in character, and I have no fucking clue what those identities consist in since I am them for the most part. I can't imagine how it would feel to feel differences in these bits and be bullied for it! I guess maybe it's something like discovering a body part by feeling it ache.
Perhaps this is because I am insane, but I see the social roles and the body bits they concern as equally fundamental to the process of my gender identity and expression; it's not just me over here and the social world over there, I'm already over there and it's already over here. I'm differentiated from it but part of it. My gender is as much a process of inter-relation between bodies and social roles as it is the bodies and the roles which express the process. Such a 'social object' is a living, sensuous how rather than an inert insertion (oo-er) of whats into an independent medium. These processes are as much fleshy as legislative, like penstrokes branding dicks as M and M as rugged, or modes under different aspects playing out in the same substance. This seems far more amenable to me than " dick => man (behind the curtain) "
There're lots of gender metaphysics, this lesbian Deleuze-Butler slash-fic buggery I just offered you is one. I think it's pretty consistent with the UN definition; it emphasises bodies, gender identities, sexes and gender expression as a connected whole of overlapping but distinct components that mediate between but are carried forth by the bodies (human, social) the account concerns.
Start thinking in terms where trans people actually exist and I'll respond in more detail.
You need to define gender in order to define transgenders and where they are. Is gender a feeling or is it a social construction?
Why would trans people exist in certain places if it was an internal feeling and individual view of themselves as opposed to a social construction?
Trans people only seem to exist in western countries where a small fraction of parents raise their child as the opposite sex rather than in a gender-neutral environment. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist elsewhere as they could be labeled not as trans but as criminals or delusional. Again it comes down to defining it in a consistent and coherent way.
Raising a child as the opposite sex is limiting what your child wears and plays with based on their opposite sex and is just as egregious if not more so to the gender-neutral movement as raising your child to limit what they wear and play with based on their actual sex. Its all about sex.
No. The name 'transgender' might be new, but people who don't fit snugly in male and female archetypes for their culture and time period are not.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Define define. Define need. Define feeling. Define social construction. Only then will I be able to understand what you write, and I am responding in earnest. If this request seems ridiculous, wonder why such incredulity does not apply to yours. If you seriously don't know what gender is, here is the WHO's definition of it as it relates to social constructions.
And here's Google's definition of it:
And self-identity because, yeah... apparently necessary too:
If you're still having trouble understanding what gender roughly is and how it relates to feelings and social contexts, cultures, identity, self identity and so on, re-read what I quoted here.
Hope that helps.
But doesn't the 'self-' bit of 'self-identity' as...
"the perception or recognition of one's characteristics as a particular individual, especially in relation to social context."
...contradict
"Gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. It varies from society to society and can be changed. While most people are born either male or female, they are taught appropriate norms and behaviours – including how they should interact with others of the same or opposite sex within households, communities and work places."
One cannot seem to self-identify by the first criteria as a member of some category in the second definition because the second definition makes it clear such membership criteria are taught and imposed by culture, not determined freely by individuals.
Isn't this the nub of the feminist concern about transgender issues, that society's imposed criteria for 'womanhood' become some fixed biological trait that people are born with, identifiable by the self, not imposed by the culture?
Your self-description reminds me of part 51 of "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman (especially the famous part, highlighted in bold):
51
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
[b]Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)[/b]
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version
I'm glad it reminded you of something legitimately good.
Exactly. There have to be these binary archetypes existent in a cultures for there to someone who might want to play the opposite archetype. Eliminate the archetypes and you end up with a gender neutral society and you eliminate transgenderism at the same time. Like I said, transgenders aren't being gender neutral. They are enforcing the binary gender system by claiming to be the opposite sex when performing the acts that some society expects of that sex. In a gender neutral society there would be no acts that make one a man or a woman other than the biological ones that have to do with procreation.
Quoting fdrake
Quoting fdrake
Quoting Isaac
It looks like someone else gets it.
Also from Google:
"Man" and "woman" are terms used to designate not just sex, but species. One's species is probably the most important distinction these terms make. Just as "buck" and "doe" are terms used to refer to male and female deer, we have terms to refer to male and female humans. These aren't social constructions.
Seems to me that this is saying that women and men are physical, biological entities that have these ideas imposed on them by culture. Culture has a way of imposing unnatural rules on us - of treating us unequally and differently. It seems to me that changing ones gender entails changing the society you live in, not by changing your appearance.
If gender is imposed on an individual, then how can an individual choose their own gender?
How can I be part of this family I'm born into?
Correction: entails a biological and/or social bond. People are generally not biologically related to their spouses, in-laws count as families, as do adopted relations. On the flip side, we can and do disown people biologically related to us based on their treatment of us.
Where do you think this dichotomy comes from? Between 'taught and imposed by culture' and 'determined freely by individuals'?
This isn't a correction because you didn't read 's question, which asks how can one be part of a family one is born into. I didn't understand the question as one is born from a mother and father's genetic material, unless drakes is using an alternate form of "family". If he meant society or culture, he could of just used those terms, but he's being vague and avoiding me now.
Quoting fdrake
Natural selection. The term is called "sexual dimorphism".
Hence the disowning bit.
Not sure if you're asking how I think it came to be, or what I think it is about those factors which give rise to a dichotomy. Presuming the second, it's about the knowledge drawn on to make the classification.
Ultimately, man, woman, are just words, right? Words can be used correctly or incorrectly and the arbiter of 'correctness' has to be the function of the word (unless you can think of anywhere else 'correctness' could be kept). So, with the aspects of 'man' and 'woman' which refer to gender (there are obviously other uses the same words are put to), they are categorising words, they assign people to groups. So the question of whether they've performed this function 'correctly' has to be one which the language-user community can answer. Otherwise you end up with a private language, which is a nonsense.
Say you're born into a family where your parents used ivf with donor sperm and eggs. They also had already adopted two other kids. They raise you and love you your whole life.
According to you, these would not be your family?
And, btw, you can very much legally disown children and parents.
And a community of transgenders or non-binary people who report conflicts between the cultural norms they're in, their gender expression, the expectations of their bodies, and the words they need to use to describe them... This doesn't count as a linguistic community? I mean, this isn't a private language. There are commonalities of experience here, shared cultural norms, shared words - just a different embedding in them.
Of course it does, just as 'sick' means good among the youth (so I'm reliably informed). But that doesn't make it mean good for every user of the word.
Quoting fdrake
No, it's not about experience, we could each 'experience' our own beetle and still be none the wiser about the contents of anyone else's box. For a word to mean something there has to be some use it is put to, the rule for which can be corrected by some community of language users. It's not sufficient to simply have a community of language users all using a word. They could all regularly say "piff", but if each means a different thing by it and each has their own private rule as to where it applies, then they each fall foul of the private language argument, simply being a community isn't enough, the word must have some rule which is held communally too, which means (for words used as classification) the measures must be publicly accessible, they cannot be entirely private.
Ok, so why does the way the UN definitions of gender expression/identity and transgender and sex put you in mind that it's a private language? Or analogise to it? I would be extremely surprised if anything which is decided by a committee and put on a public resource for general consumption is anything to do with a private language.
But 'gender expression', 'transgender' and 'sex' are not the terms I'm suggesting suffer from the private language problem. The categories within them are. It's like everyone agreeing what 'colour' refers to but claiming a private set of criteria for what is 'blue'.
If you can find me a UN definition of 'woman' that satisfies both feminists and trans-women/trans-men, I'll grant there may not be a private language problem. But the moment the word 'woman' is used to describe how a single individual feels, with no external reference at all (associated behaviours such as with 'pain', 'happiness' etc), then I can't see how we escape the private language problems.
Right. I can see that. But it completely baffles me how you think gender identity is just what an individual feels, rather than a composition of how someone feels and society's norms... how they identify with them? Their place in them? Can you really not talk about how it feels to take a place in a social role? Society? Culture?
What it feels like to be a Wittgensteinian doing philosophy...
I don't necessarily. There is a feature of a person which could be something like which social group they "feel" like they belong to. Someone might say, "I feel like I belong, or identify myself as, the societal group labelled 'woman'". They might feasibly say this despite having male genitalia, mixed genitalia, or no genitalia at all. But none of this tells us what the label 'woman' actually refers to. The community of 'woman'-users is the only thing that can tell us that.
Once we accept that, it must follow that someone might say "I feel like I belong to the category 'woman', but the community of language users say back" well, you don't".
Another, simpler aspect of the private language argument is that the rule for applying the word has to be checkable with a community of users, it has to be possible to be wrong about the rule, otherwise it is a private rule.
In what way can the definition of 'woman' being advanced here, be non-privately wrong. Someone must be able to use the word 'woman' (even of themselves) and the language community be able to say "no, you've mis-applied the rule", otherwise it is a private rule. Yet what's being advocated here is that it is impossible for an individual to mis-apply the rule when talking of themselves (yet it is possible to mis-apply the rule when talking of others, which is a whole other problem).
Quoting fdrake
Talking about it is not the same as using it as a rule to correctly use terms.
One of the things that suggests a rule is in play is that mis-identification can happen. It does. Most of the time gender non-conforming teens stop gender non-conforming and do not feel the need to transition. There is at least tension there.
Formally speaking anyway, 'identifying with a gender' isn't a speech act on par with writing down a symbol for a mental sensation, it's a whole social role which is performed; a correlated series of speech acts with bodies and gestures, choices, thinking styles, norms... The image that you have of 'identification' with a gender is very shallow if you think that it resembles writing down a symbol to convey the presence of a sensation in all relevant respects.
That would still be self-misidentification. The whole point of the private language argument is that correcting oneself (alone) makes the rule meaningless. The community of rule-users has to be able to say that the rule is being incorrectly applied.
Quoting fdrake
Indeed, it would be, if that was what I thought, but it isn't. I'm talking solely about the use of gender terms in language, nothing else.
A headline I read in the paper recently was "man gives birth". They had used the term 'man' on the sole basis of the person concerned claiming to feel like one (their private rule) and they were clearly using to term to function as a means of categorisation (otherwise the headline would not even be newsworthy).
I'm not in any sense saying that people do not have a private view as to what gender role they act out. I'm saying that it makes no sense for them to have a private view as to what referent the gender words are used to pick out.
And why do you think this view is commonplace?
People are labouring under the expectation gender means something other than gender. Gender isn't recognised as itself amongst many people. They think a membership granted by having some other fact.
So what can the trans person mean in this context? The usual accounts of gender membership don't work. Their identity is opposite or other to other gender asserted in these accounts. Something else has to be found. Feelings are usually that. It's both presence of something other and a feature common to instance of trans identity. One of few replacements for genital, chromosomes or long hair to be found.
Feelings become the account of how someone is trans or not in these instances. So terrible confusions will remain until it's realised one is not speaking about something other than gender, but rather a fact of gender itself, set by nothing other than itself. (In which case, one is trans because they have a gender which is other to what is expected under some notion of gender).
:up:
Other than seeing gender as an umbrella term that partakes in lots of social/biological processes, I agree. The content of gender norms is just what we count as part of them collectively, with some influence from statistical properties of bodies changing over the sex difference, but most of what's relevant to gender is history and socialisation.
I guess what grinds my gears here is that trans people have commonalities of experience, as do men and women, so do non-binaries. You can do sociology, anthropology, psychology and medicine on this topic. If discourse on gender and the self reports/gender identifying processes of people were so lacking fixity, like the arbitrariness you suggest in:
I'd think the world would look a lot different. If gender identification actually worked like what W criticises in the private language argument; there could be no articulable commonalities. And there are.
Also,transsexualism is not coherent on it's own. Transsexualism reaffirms gender binarism by default. It is impossible to divorce binary from transsexualism.
Let's assume, "transgenderism and transsexualism" are used synonymously (in my experience, they are). If they are not used synonymously, then performatively requesting hormones or 'surgical augmentation' to address "transgenderism" is incoherent.
P1: All males and females must contain all the necessary biological attributes to be 'male' and female'.
P2: All 'males' and 'females' contain the necessary biological attributes needed "to be" 'male' and female'.
P3: A male that lacks necessary attributes necessary for to be considered 'female' is not a female.
P4: A female that contains both necessary attributes of both 'female' and 'male' is neither male or female, but intersex. QED.
This by default means a-genderism/gender neutralism is incoherent.
---
P1: "Transition" denotes passing of all necessary attributes from one to another.
P2: All necessary biological attributes are 'fixed' at birth.
P3: Biological attributes cannot be 'changed' without artificial intervention/frequent injections (i.e. lacks necessary attributes) or augmentation (mimicking), therefore static biological sex cannot 'change' if necessary attributes cannot transition.
P4: "Transsexualism" (and 'trans' - genderism) is therefore incoherent. QED.
"Transsexualism" addresses sex-change, almost all "transgenders" use the terms interchangeably and claim to feel 'female' - which presents an incoherent performative contradiction.
--
As a generalization:
P1: "Transgenders" cannot be considered a 'female' without first adopting the 'identity' of a woman (e.g. traditionally 'womanly roles') first.
P2: Determination of biological female sex is not dependent on adopted social identification and castes. (e.g. butch lesbians).
P3: Transgenders claim to have all necessary "female" attributes without surgery, therefore, they are "female" and must augmented to be so.
If not P2, then P3 is inconsistent, and "Transgenderism" is incoherent. If not P3, then transgenderism is incoherent in so far 'transgender' must have augmented necessary attributes to alleviate "dysphoria" (i.e. confusion), not that the transgender is certain they are 'female/male'. Reassignment biological augmentations treat/suppress confusion not "transgenderism/transsexualism".
It is same to say addressing transsexualism with surgery is not consistent with what they claim to be, and not the best method, only practical to alleviate temporary stress. So, yes, it is entirely a 'mental thing'. Whether or not it is an illness is moot, but from what is known of mental illnesses, it is a mental illness, and it is definitely a disorder, in so far as it disrupts daily functioning.
To start with, 'Gender' is a word. It defines what the language users use it to define. There isn't a thing it is which the whole community must consult before using the term. There's no God-given dictionary we all learnt as children. There is only the thing it is used for. So you're mistaken to suggest there's a thing that 'gender' is that we must find out before using the term. There are just things, we name some of them 'gender'. The things come first, names after. The 'correct' application of the term 'gender' is whatever the community of language users find it useful to use the word for.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Again, you're presuming I'm talking about the trans experience. I'm not denying the trans experience. I'm not denying that people don't feel they fit into the gender roles society assigns them. I'm not denying people feel, they want to belong to a gender other than that which they've been assigned (or perhaps one outside of all the options currently available). None of this is in contention because it is self-evidently the case.
What I'm talking about is language use and language use alone.
I'm talking solely about the meaning of the term 'woman' and the meaning of the term 'man'. To apply terms, there must be some rule as to their 'correct' application. That rule cannot be private, it must be one which is held by society, otherwise the word is meaningless as an assignation in an act of communication. If the meaning of the term 'woman' is held by society to mean anything other than biological appearance, then it creates an imposition to meet those criteria on anyone wanting to claim that term. Hence the feminist issue with trans identity arguments.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Absolutely. A fine definition of the word 'trans'. A shame this isn't about the definition of the word 'trans'. It's about the definition of the word 'woman'/'man'.
That's exactly the problem. The moment there are commonalities attached to the term 'woman' there are expectations created as criteria for the use of that word. There has to be otherwise using the word becomes meaningless as per the private language argument. so if there are 'commonalities' between all the trans people who were born male but feel like a 'woman', if those commonalities are what make their use of the term 'woman' correct among their community of language users, then what is to be made of someone born with female genitalia, who themselves does not chare those commonalities? They are no longer correct in defining themselves as a 'woman' because the term is 'correctly' used to define the commonalities you describe (though I'm at a loss to know what they might be).
Again, you're arguing against something of a straw man and I'm having to repeat myself a quite unreasonable number of times here such that I starting to feel there's some disingenuousness to your responses. I am not talking about whether trans people really exist, I'm not talking about whether they have an experience worthy of some term to describe it. I'm talking about the means by which society holds the rule for the correct use of the terms 'woman' and 'man'.
Let me try this for simplicity. In your view, how does a two/three year old begin to learn they way in which to use the term 'woman'? Under what circumstances would a member of their language community say they had used the word wrongly, to describe themselves?
Sure, I'll grant that, but what does that have to do with what frdake said, or this topic?
Quoting ArtemisYou're talking about legalities. I'm talking about genetics.
So trans people aren't men or women, they are trans. You can't say that trans have a commonality of experience with men or women, only other trans.
There are commonalities of experience between people with mental disorders. What does it mean to diagnose someone with a mental disorder? It means that they share common thoughts and behaviors with others that are abnormal.
The whole point was, if you don't recall, that family is based on actions and social roles rather than just genetics.
If we can assert that I can become part of a family without being genetically related to them, and if I can stop being part of a family I am genetically related to, then it's an action and choice-based social role.
Same could be said of gender then. I might genetically be male, but if I act and live like a woman, it seems one could argue that a person could thus become a woman.
Btw, a better rebuke to fdrake's example of family would have been that familial relations are, well, relational. As in, not only does another person have to exist for me to be related to them, they have to either implicitly or explicitly agree to be my son, father, brother, etc.
What form of life underpins the uses of the word 'woman', 'man', 'gender' etc? Come on, words are never just words alone. We have the benefit of a social background to look at here.
As I've already said, I'm focusing on the use of those words to assign to categories, to label. Of course those same words could be used in other contexts to do any number of other jobs, but I'm not talking about those. So the form of life would be that of assigning people in our community to sub-groups. The purpose of such assignation varies wildly and I couldn't possibly list them all here.
I'm not sure how this links to the issue of private language?
Can you describe how this works to me? Like, give me an example.
So, if someone puts a sign on a toilet door which says 'women only' they're intending that it has a certain effect on the world. Probably, in this case, that it eliminates anyone with male genetalia. If I create a 'women only' safe space, the effect I'm looking for might be slightly different, but ultimately, it is still to eliminate some sub-group with a good degree of predictability. When a shop has a section labelled 'women's clothing' it's aiming to help those people looking for a certain style of clothing to find what they're after.
All of these different uses rely absolutely on public meanings of the word.
If the toilet attendant intended to eliminate people with female genetalia we would say he'd used the wrong word, if the clothes shop intended to direct people to the trousers and three-piece suits, we'd say they'd used the wrong word.
We'd say this because the word would not carry out the function they intended for it. It would fail to carry out that function because it was being used contrary to the expectations of the other language users.
So you imagine a sorting procedure.
Person -label> Gender
And it's important that -label> is done 'publicly', whatever that means here. What I'm guessing you mean is that the information about each person which is used to label them with a gender is done 'publicly', so it's something which has a social-behavioural-biological component which everyone has access to.
So when someone says they feel like a different gender, I imagine you imagine that they're taking their feeling 'I'm not this gender, I'm that one', and they're trying to put this feeling through the sorting machine above, and voila they're now whatever gender they desired as a result of their feelings. IE, their feelings suffice for the correct application of the identity label.
This sound about right?
We're talking about two different kinds of familial relationships. My point was that you don't need a government or culture to create the biological family relationship that is inherent in nature. You can only disown the socially constructed version.
But how can you disown the socially constructed version? I thought there wasn't one!
I never said there wasn't one. I said that they're different types of relationships - genetic and social - and that we're not talking about the same one. Why do you think that is?
Again, it goes back to how you define gender as being biological or social. We've already shown that "man" and "woman" are terms that refer to one's biology. So that makes "gender" a biological term, not a social one.
When a naked woman says she feels like a woman, is she referring to her social role, or her biological state?
When a naked man says that he feels like a woman, is he referring to his social role, or his biological state?
If he only feels like a woman when wearing a dress, then how is it that the naked woman and man with a dress feel the same thing? Are they referring to two different things? Why the discrepancy?
Now, let's imagine a world where we have this mystical new word called 'gender_H', which refers to the socially constructed aspects of gender. We're going to forget the bits and bodies and look at what people do with them and how the words come out of their mouths. Can we do that? Can we forget the bits and bodies for 'gender_H' like we could for family? Or are you not prepared to enter into the mystical magical world of socially constructed aspects of gender?
Your use of "mystical" says it all. Is gender some supernatural, magical thing now? I can reject mystical things simply based on the fact that there is no proof of such things.
No, social constructions aren't magic. They're just like being able to disown a family you're born into. You don't disown the hereditary mechanism, that'd be a category error, but you don't belong in a family just because you're born into it; otherwise disowning would be impossible. If you can bend your mind to accept a dictionary definition, or Google's, or the UN's, where gender has socially constructed aspects, I'd be very happy to continue trying to explain word meanings to you.
Otherwise, I hope the low hanging fruit is tasty where you're from.
We already went over Google's definition of "man" and "woman" which refers to biological states, not social constructions. So I'm using the same sources as you, so it seems that it is you that can't bend your mind to accept a Google definition.
A social construction can't be rejected by an individual feeling, or else it's not a social construction.
Wikipedia, which Google puts up at the top of the search page when searching "social construction", so Google is promoting Wiki's definitions:
So a social construction is jointly constructed and form the basis for shared assumptions about reality. I don't see any room here for a social construction to be rejected. I can see how you can not participate in a social construction, and abandoning one's socially constructed family would effectively leave you without a family - of you not participating in the social construction any longer, so why would you still call yourself a son/daughter? Why do transgenders insist on using the socially constructed terms if they are rejecting it?
Quoting Harry Hindu
What are you imagining happens here? Like... are you literally imagining that someone says "I'm a woman" and then they become a woman? Is this the social process you're attacking? As if it's real?
Yes. There's two kinds of family. Biological and social.
That's the same difference between sex and gender. Sex is biological and cannot currently be changed. Gender is social, and thus can probably be altered.
In fact, gender has been altered over the centuries already. What a woman is supposed to act and dress and live like has changed.
I think the problems really only arise when SOME transgenders want to say biology is not real or that they are female or participate in female sports or say that they are and always were women instead of choosing to become a woman.
Just as you disowning your socially constructed family makes you a non-son and non-daughter, disowning the social construction of gender makes you a non-man and non-woman.
If you are rejecting the social construction, then stop using the terms associated with that social construction.
Now... what if instead of disowning the entire social construction of gender and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a person came to disown the gender associated with their birth sex?
Then at that point you've crossed the line to it being biological.
Actually, now that I think about it, that equates to disowning the social construction.
Edit: Harry's original post, which I should've quoted, contained the claim that someone can reject gender as a social construction and become non-gendered as a result (and this is fine), but someone cannot reject any particular gender and become another as a result of this identification. Yes, for those reading, the whole framing of this is stupid, because it's not a personal choice and personal choices are not sufficient for gender identity - people make a choice to transition or present differently because of lots of reasons, not some abstract on-off social identity, like changing your clothes to dress as a scene kid. Anyway...
So someone can disown the entire social construct of gender and become non-gendered, but they can't disown the gender associated with their birth sex. The first is not biological, the second is. Let's describe it some other way.
Let's paint a picture of gender where it's some {M, F} thing where each person gets branded with M or F. Now, what you're saying is that the only rejection of a gendered social construction which can happen is the rejection of {M,F}, and they thereby become non-gendered by rejecting the couple {M,F} as applying to them. Why can't someone reject a member of this set, {M,F}, and identify with the other one?
Why is rejecting gender so different from rejecting the gender you're wrongly branded with?
Let's just forget that you're treating social identity as a personal choice. Which, you know, you're simultaneously saying is a conceptual error making it logically impossible and claiming this is really what people are doing when they are trans (also see @Isaac 's position on the PLA and @StreetlightX's comment on it).
But you can adopt a new family....
I wonder if it really matters if it's a choice or not. Like, the LGB community used to insist on their rights because they said it wasn't. But now more people I think realize that it doesn't matter. Like who cares if someone chooses that? It's a legitimate path to pursue either way and nobody else's business really.
I don't personally care about whether it's a choice or not. To me that looks like the wrong framing entirely. @Harry Hindu is framing things that way, and I'm trying to follow him down his personal rabbit hole and place some landmines.
That's all understood, but it's just lazy writing on my part, not anything which undermines the position I'm taking. Something being a private language and therefore being meaningless is not materially different in implication here in this context from something that would be a private language if it were as it is claimed to be, and therefore cannot be so.
I'm happy to take a slapped wrist for sloppy writing, but I don't agree that it "badly misrepresents" the private language argument. The point is the much same. Wittgenstein was not claiming it was somehow physically impossible to attempt to use a word by what one imagines to be a private rule. In fact he gives an example of exactly that. The point is that it wouldn't function, not that one couldn't try.
If people are using a word, they must expect that it has a public meaning, otherwise the use is incoherent. That's the point I'm making. If someone uses a word to define themselves by criteria to which only they are privy, it is no different from Wittgenstein's example of sensation recording.
I'd also appreciate it if you would consider commenting me in when criticising my posts, I appreciate the opportunity to respond.
A public meaning does not mean 'an already established meaning'. It refers to a meaning available to public use, or use by others. This could be the case if it is used by one person and not a single other soul on the planet. The 'community of language users' could all die in a fire and so long as a use is able to be learned in principle, then it is public. As I will never cease pointing out every time this misreading takes place, not even the very word 'community' appears even once in the PI. Frankly I think your use of Wittgenstein here is abominable, and does a mutilating disservice to both Wittgenstein and understandings of gender.
Yes, that is pretty much what I think.
Quoting fdrake
I personally doubt there's a single thing a person would be expecting the labelling act to achieve. The point is, I can't see anyone committing a speech act without the intention to achieve something. Like with the toilet attendant, the women's group, the shop... They're all using the term 'woman' to do some job and if it fails to do that job we might reasonably say they've used the word incorrectly. It does its job by the response of others who know what the intended response is.
I say "duck!", you duck. I say "I'm a woman/man", you... what? The options seem to be
1) do nothing whatsoever - the word seems no more than a name, certainly not the intent behind "man gives birth".
2) treat me like a woman - the concern of the feminists, that there is a consistent thing that is 'like a woman'.
3) treat me only like a woman so far as the context seems to specify - genetalia for toilets, perhaps looks for the women's group, clothing preferences for the shop... With none of these being right or wrong, only contextual.
So unless you can think of a fourth response, I think 3 is the better. Which means "man gives birth" (and other attempts to solidify identity choices) is a stupid headline because the only reason it would be newsworthy is in the biological context which is the one context in which its incorrect to label the person concerned a 'man'
You can keep the old notion of sex, bodily sex, birth sex, what reproductive organs people are born with and so on. No one is thinking that these will change (without transitioning surgery) due to some shamanic utterance (which never actually happens) of "I am a woman" decreeing for now and always in the stone tablets that make up social reality (apparently) that its utterer is indeed a woman since their speech act was sincere.
If you're analysing gender in terms of speech acts, this is all well and good, but gender identity itself is not determined by a self-branding speech act; "I'm a man" is something someone might say for a lot of reasons. I vaguely remember @Harry Hindu claiming to be an oppressed trans woman last time we spoke about this issue, so there are really a lot of reasons someone might identify as trans, or a man, or a woman, no? Gender isn't just talk about gender, it's bodies and performances too.
If you wanna Wittgensteinian gloss on it, start thinking of gender as a family resemblance of language games and their attended forms of life, rather than as a condensate of self identifying speech acts (alone).
So, with a use where 'woman' is a label based on a private feeling, how is anyone able to learn it's use in principle?
Yes, I did say that I don't imagine a single purpose behind "I am a man", what I'm asking is why, in some contexts, the correct response could not be "no you're not". Maybe you're thinking that would be OK, in which case we don't disagree, but my personal experience of talking about trans issues is that such a response is never OK, meaning context is removed, gender becomes one thing and one thing only and that is the expression of the private feeling of an individual. I don't take that to be coherent, for the same reasons Wittgenstein gives (in spite of StreetlightX's whiney protestations to the contrary).
It is no more a label based on a private feeling than the word 'pain' is a label based on a private feeling. And just as we learn to use the word 'pain', we learn to use the word 'woman' or 'man'. Or any other word for that matter. Words are not labels, this is literally the first lesson of the PI, literally the first thing broached in §1.
The rub is that private languages don't occur at all. They're not possible.
So it would be extremely surprising to find one 'out in the wild', no? Especially when people are talking about it. This is why I've focussed on how you're imagining gender rather than on the specifics of the PLA, because you seem to be imagining a world where trans people are... somehow... behaving in a way where they'd like a private language to exist? But yeah, they're really not.
I think you're completely over-estimating the role that "I am a woman" or whatever plays in the social process of identifying as any gender. No one would sincerely say "I am a woman" as a statement of their identity solely because of 'private feelings', they would feel a certain way about social relations and social roles which leads them to reject (or embody) the social branding and expectations. Whether they are motivated by personal feelings is much different from whether they are somehow imagining an impossible language whereby feelings alone can vouchsafe the meaning of words.
Really, the error in imagining you're having is that you're thinking of these things as 'feelings alone' or 'private feelings'. As if they're not also reactions to public phenomena.
If you lose your job and feel sad at the resultant effects on your life, you don't suddenly invent a language whereby 'I'm sad' = 'I lost my job' do you? Nah, these things interpenetrate each other, they correlate without conceptual reduction. There are manifest commonalities between trans experience, woman's experience, man's experience, points of overlap, effects of norms. We're in the same social world playing the same language games.
Except, perhaps, those who would consign the discourse of gender identity to meaninglessness. But that's not a game I'm gonna play.
A hundred times this. And maybe we can be done with the regressive, transphobic misreadings of Wittgenstein now, passed off as innocent language philosophy.
No. We learn to use the word pain by observing the actions and reactions of people using the word. If we say "I'm in pain" every time we laugh, smile carelessly and skip about with joy, we are using the word incorrectly. Pain has to have external, publicly available signs for us to use it, otherwise it would be impossible to learn. It cannot be a private feeling alone.
Quoting StreetlightX
Of course they are, they're just not only labels. What have I just put on my jar with the word "jam" if not a label? The word "jam" is serving as a label.
And exactly what do you think those asking to be called women are asking?
Personally I share the concerns of the feminist argument. I think a significant portion of what they're asking is to be treated like a woman. Which reinforces the idea that there is a treatment appropriate to women, an idea that feminists have spent years trying to break down.
The reason I think this is because the alternative (using the term to correctly identify a private feeling) is so incoherent.
The second part of your sentence seems to contradict the first. It reads to me as - they would not do so because of feeling, they would do so because of some way they feel. Which is the same thing.
I'm looking for some publicly available criteria, something people could use to learn how to use the word correctly.
Quoting fdrake
Again, a reaction is a feeling is it not? Unless you're talking about the request (number 2 in my options) which I agree is the real reason such a claim is made. But that runs into the problems of an 'appropriate' treatment for women.
I think you've both got the wrong impression of what I'm arguing. I'm not saying that the trans position is to make some kind of private language. I'm saying that the position it claims in response to accusations of gender stereotyping would do if it were true. I'm claiming that the trans agenda is very much at risk of gender stereotyping and its claims to the contrary are incoherent.
I'm sorry I have no idea what you're saying because the reasons are just in your head.
Pretty much, yes. I'd certainly prefer that a woman can act and ask to be treated in any way conceivable without that implying that she belongs to some group which also happens to be the one anyone with a penis is presumed to belong.
I dunno, I can be sympathetic to the idea that removal of all gender archetypes is pretty good, but to me it seems like "I don't want immigrant rights and acceptance because I don't believe in borders", I mean maybe politically it's a different thing for you.
"An embrace of unintelligibility ... of a rejection of meaning and stability might have presented a useful method of resistance, if gender operated merely at the level of ideals and ideology. If gender was nothing more than the belief in stable ontological identities, then perhaps a rejection of that belief might be enough. But gender is more than a belief. Gender represents a material reality which divides the world not just at the level of the ideal but at the level of labor, economics, and life itself. Gender divides the world into those who do specific types of labor and those who don’t, into those are financially independent subjects and those who are financially dependent. This division does not occur merely at the level of ideals but in the day to day material matter lives of individuals.
If gender operates not merely at the ideological or symbolic level, then a response which does operate only at that level is inadequate. As such, I am quite convinced that the model of resistance proposed in Gender [abolishionism] needs to rejected, and a new model developed on the basis of a material investigation into the material base which produces the ideologies of gender and difference".
Yes, there are complications, probably more than I know (I have only a passing interest in gender issues related to some work I did years back), but it's still my gut feeling until overwhelmingly condradicted. I will have a read of the article, and respond to it properly when I have more time.
Thanks for the article, it was a very good read. I'm not sure I see in it any significant opposition to what I've been talking about her. I think the author is making a similar point to the one FDrake's made about immigrants lacking representation the moment we are nihilistic about borders. I'm not talking here about representation. Yes the category 'woman' already exists but it has several, not one single function in our society. I get that simply refusing to acknowledge it is not going to undermine those functions which are oppressive. I agree that to do so we must look to the mechanisms and causes.
But there are ways and means to do that which do not involve further re-enforcement of those structures. As I said earlier, the word 'Woman', even just when used as a means of categorisation, a label, already does large number of jobs. there's no need for anyone entering the 'Women's' section of a clothes shop to imagine they have to have female genetalia, the label is categorising a clothing style. Not so for someone entering a 'Women's' changing room. Here clothing style is irrelevant, but genetalia is hugely important. As language users, we don't have any trouble at all with recognising different uses in different contexts. So it is a doomed political strategy to try and unify contexts under one use. A 'man' did not give birth, a 'woman' did. In the context of "giving birth" the relevant distinction is an ovary/womb. That same person might shop in the 'Women's' section of a clothes shop (if that's what they prefer). They might even be accepted into a 'Women's only' safe-space, if the people there are mostly concerned about avoiding testosterone-fuelled behaviour. Appearance, body-shape, behaviour... all different ways of understanding what counts as being a 'woman' in different contexts.
We're seeing people wanting their birth certificates corrected, wanting access to changing rooms, wanting to be referred to by the same gender word at all times. Basically there is a move to base all categorisation contexts on the same nebulous distinguishing criteria and that is to the poverty of language, and a very poor political strategy if undermining oppressive forms of categorisation is the aim. We already have in our lexicon the means by which we can use categorisation terms differently depending on context. That's a good start, that means we can have 'women-only' safe spaces and 'women-only' jobs (women's prison warden, for example) refer to two different means of categorising gender. The moment we accept the discourse that only one means exists (the feelings of the person concerned) and that such a method must be applied in all cases, we lose those markers of progress.
Language does not proscribe how we act: we, in our actions, proscribe how language is used. Linguistic use [I]is[/I] an action. Reversing the relation to perversive some imaginary ‘markers of progress’ (what ‘progress?’ Toward what? Some ideal? Of what? But language does not mirror any ideal, not even provisionally, as Wittgenstein pointed out over and over) is nothing other than arbitrarily reifying some uses of language because - what? - that’s how we currently use words? But who cares? The point is to change the use. If you or anyone else is so threatened by gender unintelligibility that others must pay the price for your intellectual confusion speaks not to the problems of others, but to problems that are yours and yours alone.
It's not the language that makes it so, it's the people using it. Someone using the word 'women' on a toilet door is doing so with the intention that the word use will do something (in this case cause people with non-female genitalia to exclude themselves from the room). He can only reasonably expect the word use to have the desired effect if others respond to it predictably, if they too know what effect it was intended to have.
But the something that people want the word to do varies with context. In the 'women's' section of the clothes shop they don't want it to do the same job as with the toilet door. But years ago they did, that's the progress I'm referring to. Years ago one would be expected to exclude oneself from the 'women's' section of the clothes store on the same grounds as the toilets. Now we have a more nuanced and varied criteria in different circumstances.
What concerns me when I hear, for example, about trans people wanting to change the wording on their birth certificate, wanting to enter the toilet room of their chosen gender etc is that we're losing this variety. 'Woman' no longer means different things in different contexts, it means "the gender role I identify with" in every single context. That's a step backwards in the progress to gender nihilism.
Quoting StreetlightX
Are you suggesting that no one but me takes issue with the trans agenda with regards to gender terms? If so, I can refer you to some feminist authors who have similar concerns. If not, then they're not mine and mine alone, are they? So those who must "pay the price" are not a clearly distinguished group. The whole concern here is over who will pay the price and what that price will be.
Then to hell with those people.
Quoting Isaac
I don't care about 'variety' of words. I care about people. If words are getting in the way of treating human beings decently, then so much the worse for words.
I never said it was a choice. Having a mental or social disorder isn't a choice. Being born a man or woman isn't a choice. It was Artemis that was mentioning that it was a choice.
Quoting fdrake
Using your own example of a person disowning their socially constructed family, a man can't disown his mother and father and then start calling himself a daughter. It makes no sense, but according to you it does. How?
Using your own source of Google for definitions, "man" and "woman" are biological entities, not social constructions. So it makes no sense to say "man" and "woman" are genders if genders are social constructions and not biological entities.
Using your own source "social constructions" are shared assumptions about reality. If gender were a social construction, then gender isn't "man" or "woman". Those would be the biological realities. The assumptions (and therefore gender) would be "women wear dresses and makeup and have long hair". You are confusing biological realities with shared assumptions about those realities.
I find it hard to understand that you don't understand. Samantha is born a girl with girl bits. Her birth sex is female. Samantha is gender non-conforming. Eventually Samantha identifies as a man and changes her gender expression and gender identity to male. He changes his name to Sam to reflect this. As an adult, Sam has gender identity of male, gender expression of male, but Sam's birth sex was female, Sam's anatomy might still be female; that of Sam's birth sex; and even if Sam did take gender transition surgery or hormone therapy, nothing about that would change that Sam's birth sex was female.
This is pretty simple, no? It looks to me like you're being wilfully ignorant of the distinction between birth sex and gender identity, then reading everything I've written as if that distinction made no sense. The only thing this reveals is that you either don't understand it, or don't want to understand it.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I mean the Google definition of gender also says:
Why is this so hard for you?
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is just nonsense. Gender expression, gender identity and sex are distinct, but correlated. The UN characterisation says that, the definitions I presented are consistent with this.
Gender, as defined by your source, is a shared assumption. She identifies with an shared assumption, but her assumption isn't shared by others. Incoherent.
You're also saying that shared assumptions are identities. Incoherent.
Quoting fdrake
It says that "gender is either of the two sexes (male and female) especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones."
If gender is either of the two sexes, then gender is biological, yet the definition contradicts itself by saying its in reference to social and cultural differences instead of biological. Incoherent.
And what kind of social and cultural differences is talking about. Differences within a culture or between cultures? Differences within a culture wouldn't be a social construction!
So are you and Google being sexist and claiming that to be a woman, you must wear a dress, makeup and have long-hair?
I dunno, I'm going to use my fiat powers to remove you from the collective and now what I'm saying has to be true.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No. Quote me where I said that.
Huh -what?
Quoting fdrake
It is necessarily implied by your argument. I pointed it out with your quote. Are you blind?
Even here, you are talking about changing one's sex, not gender. Male and female are sexes according to you. You seem to be confusing your own distinction between sex and gender. Your distinction was incoherent so it is no surprise that you are confused by your own terms.
If she changes into a male by simply changing what she wears then you are saying that in order to be a male, you have to wear a particular style of clothes. That isn't what Google is saying at all. Google is saying that there are biological sexes in which people have shared assumptions about. Is it your stance that all assumptions are correct?
And whatever happened to your socially constructed family example? Here you are talking about being born as a biological entity instead of being born into a social construction. So your family example is a poor example, and again, you are confusing biological realities with social constructions.
I dunno, saying you're unable to follow:
while simultaneously being aware of which bits are social construction and which aren't to the extent where you're pointing them out as a contradiction? Yeah. I don't think you're confused either, you're just pretending to be.
Quoting fdrake
Look at the bold text.
Is "male" and "female" sex or gender? Is "man" and "woman" sex or gender? You said that the female is a sex but male is a gender. So either you are confused by your own terms, or gender and sex are the same thing.
Quoting fdrake
Here you just provided the definition of "man" and "woman" as sexes. It then goes on to say that the sexes/genders aren't biological, or that sex/gender is a social construction. Is sex and species a social construction, because Googles does define "man" and "woman" as species-specific males and females?
If the differences between gender are cultural, then in order to change your gender, you'd have to change your culture, not your clothes.
Quoting fdrake
Here you go.
You just said that both "man" and "male" are gender identities. So you're saying that sex and gender are the same thing and they are both social constructions? Why don't you just answer the questions as I posed them? Repeating the same BS that I'm questioning doesn't move the ball forward.
No. Sex is anatomical. Gender is social. Sex and gender correlate. The processes that give someone a gender are not the same as the ones that give them a sex. We agree that sex is anatomical, I think. We do not agree that gender is social. If you think that 'women wear dresses' as a norm is governed by anatomical or developmental characteristics, I don't know what to tell you; sperm meets egg => wear pink?
The anatomical is the body, sex is social. Sex is a category into which someone placed or belongs. To be a man or woman on account of having a certain body is no less a norm than the question of wearing a dress, having long hair or partaking in a certain role in society.
In the sex/gender spilt, people ignore the biggest criteria cited for being a man or women of the all: the body. Sex (which is an identity) is supposed to have an immutable connection to the body, when it it is no more grounded in defining the presence of a man or woman than wearing dresses or not. Why does a man have to have a penis to be a man? It's just another individual characteristic, like wearing dresses or not.
The sex/gender split does not genuinely allow for recognition of many trans identities. Sex being understood as setting the identity or male or femle, it always leaves behind an idea trans people aren't truly men or women because their body means "they really are" their rejected identity-- "Ah yes, they say their gender identity is female, but look at their male body.."
The sex/gender split is outright saying trans women are really male (they have a "male body"). It does not recognise the trans woman is female, and so has a female biology, even if she has penis and no breasts (to use the crude example).
It's really gender secret way of maintaining itself in the face of its obvious contradiction. By keeping male and female identity essential to the body, it allows the social forces which want to distribute bodies, in certain ways (e.g. only those with penises get to be in charge) to continue, even after it's been shown to be incoherent. The expectations males must do one thing, women another is maintained, for the supposedly immutable bodies are still there assigning who someone is or not.
Is gender now a supervillian with consciousness and everything?
I don't see how it makes sense to claim that differentiating female and male bodies is somehow establishing hierarchy. I can tell the difference between red and blue and not think one is superior over the other.
I also don't think it makes anymore sense to claim a female body is male just because that person would prefer it to be that way. Many people would like to change their bodies in a myriad of ways (be taller, lose weight, be younger, regrow limbs, defeat cancer, change skin color, etc) but I think it's pretty obvious that sans actual physical change, the physical doesn't change.
I think you're privileging gender over sex; specifically, I think you're making gender conceptually dependent upon sex illegitimately, whereas sex and gender 'only' ontically correlate (most people are cis) and socially couple (anatomical dicks are male sex and count as male gender) through norms. Moreover, the norms that partition bodies into anatomical characteristics are not the same norms that gender bodies socially.
Though, I do think it's unfortunate culturally/politically (for the acceptance of trans identities) that sex and gender are so correlated, and accept this as a fact of our social norms while doing what I can to highlight distinctions. It's true that anatomies within sex categories vary very much, and intersex people exist which implodes the partition of human bodies into only anatomically male and anatomically female representatives, but it's nevertheless true that there are male sexed bodies and female sexed bodies. Even if male sexed and female sexed do not jointly exhaust the possible sex characteristics of human bodies, and even if there are indeterminate cases. Analogically, the placement of orange on the colour wheel does not destroy the placement of red and yellow.
There are norms of judgement in categorising bodies into sex characteristics, 'this is a dick' 'this is a demipenis' 'this is a clitoris','this is a vulva' but I see no more reason to doubt the existence of clusters of anatomical properties (that allow of variation in their representative parts, a dick's a dick if it's a schode or a schlong, but a dick is not a demipenis) that correspond to the usual anatomical categories. If we see something different, we invent medical categorisation on the fly.
What's important is that these norms of medical categorisation of bodies or cells or bodily functions are not the same norms which associate gender with bodies.
You've missed the distinction I was going for. The partioning of an anatomical parts is not sex either. A penis+certain chromosomes, etc., no more equals sex than a penis does. That's just a reference to which body parts someone has.
Sex has an identity claim over the top of this. It's not pointing out existence of anatomical features, but asserting only certain anatomy can occur with an identity of male or female.
My point here is not that gender is dependent on sex (though that is true of notions of gender defined through an indexical of sex category), but that sex is, like gender, a social category of identity and relation. Sex is not about describing anatomy. It's about forming an order in which bodies take on a given identity or property in our understanding.
The reason the sex/gender split cannot recognise trans people properly is in how it distinguishes sex. It cordones of identities of male and female only to bodies of certain characteristics. People being unable to separate gender from sex is not the problem. Plenty of people do exactly that, conceive of gender in a way where sex is no longer it's foundation.
The problem lies in the social ordering in reference identity aren't just about gender. Many of them are about the signifcance of the body in relation to identity. Sex itself is the problem here, entirely on its own terms. If we have an account that only certain bodies can be an identity, we have system of sex roles in effect.
Sexes are terms to describe actual physical attributes, the constellation of which is really not arbitrary at all. Certain attributes go together with x or y chromosomes because that's how reproduction works best. A woman's body is shaped and works a certain way because it's better for child-bearing and nursing. Humans have only recognized these biological differences and given them names. It's as benign and normal and accurate as recognizing the difference between a cat and a dog. It's just descriptive.
Gender is the only place where proscriptions come in.
This isn't the argument that has been made. Go back and read the definitions provided by fdrake. Quoting fdrake
It doesn't make that kind of distinction. Fdrake's definition of "man" and "woman" says that they are sexes. Now is it saying that the sexes are biological, or social in this context? It then goes on to say that "especially with reference to social and cultural differences than biological ones." Is it talking about the differences between cultures? If so, then in order to change your gender, you'd have to change your culture instead of your clothes, and changing your body doesn't seem to entail changing one's sex or gender.
Sex characteristics are associated with gender archetypes. Gender archetypes are associated with sex characteristics.
Clearer?
Quoting fdrake
Then why did you say that male is a gender identity? You simply won't answer the question directly because you won't admit that you got confused with your own use of terms.
Quoting fdrake
Can you have a gender without having a sex? If not then how does one get a gender - by others labeling them, or by an individual searching their feelings? Is gender a shared assumption about a particular sex, or is it an individual feeling that someone has?
Quoting fdrake
NO! That is your position! It is you and transgenders who put women in boxes and labeling them as a "woman" not because of their anatomy, but because of their clothes. Women don't have to wear dresses to be a woman. They are women as a result of how they were born. "Women wear dresses" is the gender binary, sexist position that you have and that transgenders reinforce.
That didn't answer the question! You have a serious problem with answering questions. How does one change their gender - by changing their sex, culture, or clothes?
Explain the association and correlation between sex and gender in detail. Isn't the association/correlation sexist?
I made a thing for you.
Forget about intersex people and the other proposed gender identities for now.
People with male natal sex never have female natal sex.
People with female natal sex never have male natal sex.
People with male natal sex sometimes have female gender identity.
People with male natal sex sometimes have male gender identity.
People with female natal sex sometimes have female gender identity.
People with female natal sex sometimes have male gender identity.
How do you 'change gender identity', you adjust your gender expression to become more comfortable with your gender identity. You can't change your natal sex.
Is the association between natal sex and gender identity a source of social tension and mental pain? Yes.
Does the association between natal sex and gender identity aid in propagating sexism?
Maybe. Specifics matter here.
Does that mean the distinction between natal sex and gender identity is sexist?
No.
Sure we categorize the world with words. Sex is an anatomical category, not a social identity. "Sex" refers to those differences of anatomy and their related functions and behaviors that exist in 99.9% organisms of all species that use sex to procreate.
"Man"/"Woman" are terms that refer to differences in species and not just sex.
Here we go again repeating myself. We're going in circles because you keep forgetting the other points I already made.
If "gender" is a "social construction", then that means that their identity is a shared assumption of others, not personal inclination, and something that they can't change themselves, unless they move to a different culture where people assume different things about one's natal sex.
People don't like the taste of marmite.
Therefore no one can develop a taste for marmite.
I'm standing right where I was.
That's how it works.
Sex has in mind something more tham just difference in anatomy.
When we use sex, we are not dedicated to identifying anatomical parts. We are interested in identifying which people are male and which people are female. It’s why we don’t just point out an anatomical difference by describing their are different anatomical parts. It’s a self-defined identity. Rather than just describing what bodies people have, it’s an attempt to capture our bodies under specific conceptual meanings. Sex is a categorisation of who takes on an identity of male or female.
You’re right this is an attempt to identify a different species. Species is the same kind of category. If I assert an entity is a certain species, and so must have certain set of anatomical parts, I am making the same sort of argument defining a conceptual identity.
But it’s species which is the illusion (an antiscientific) here. For rather than taking anatomy and people on their own terms, describing bodies in terms of what states occur and are observed an each entity, species attempts to define existing bodies and entities through only our conceptual idea of which anatomy can belong to them on account of identity. The account it’s giving is working backwards.
Instead of looking out at the world, at an entity with identity and taking what bodily features it has, these accounts take species as anatomy, as if the body of entity could be defined merely by our concept of what must be. The approach is anti-scientific because it cannot track instances of the world in which a species exists or behaves in ways we do not expect. It’s using our expectations where the existence of an entity should rule.
You mean Vegemite.
Marmite is the English yeast spread.
How dare you assume yeast derivatives' identity is not persistent across cultures.
But point taken.
The objection does work.
A property of being English or Australian is not exhaustive of an identity. The entity of a yeast spread might have an identity which breaks our expectations of culture of origin, an Australian marmite or English vegemite . We always have to go to descprtion of an identity itself.
But that is why I said what I did, since the instances you were talking about were Australian vegemite. Your description failed not because there cannot be an Australian marmite, but rather because the instances of yeast spread you referred to are Australian vegemite.
Forgive me for intentionally being an idiot.
Oh I know you were being facetious, I was just taking seriously for any reader poised to attack me for supposing yeast spreads had an identity essentially defined by having some property.
I'm glad. I was also half seriously apologising for the worst sin.
Right, which would entail not recognizing or labeling anyone as man, male, woman or female. Essentially we would erase gender/sex and the related terms from our vocabulary. Transgenders want to be recognized as the opposite sex/gender. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Your employer is just jumping on the mass delusion bandwagon. Fortunately, I am my own boss.
:roll: The logic is just so bad here.
If gender/sex is a social construction, then it can't be a self-defined identity. It is a socially defined identity - a shared assumption about your sex - that certain sexes are suppose to behave a certain way. That is the reason we want to eliminate social constructions based on sex precisely because they are sexist!
You and fdrake simply don't understand what a social construction is.
And remember when I told you this:[s]Quoting Harry Hindu
No, it's that magic thing about money: if you have it, you can be any damn thing you want to be.
Harry, I've never thought that sex is a social construct.
Our identities are social constructions. You seem to.misundertand what I mean by social constuction. I do not mean a certain type of cause opposed to a biological cause. I mean the existence of a certain social relation of the world.
Social constructions frequently involve the body in their causes, since the social context involves are body reacting to the environment. Much of social constructs are biologically caused. The languages we use, for example, are a social construction. They are also caused biologically, language being a reaction of our body with our environment.
I do remember that. You are mistaking your notion of sex for the body. As I said earlier, you are reasoning backwards. Instead of working from bodies which occur and are observed, you are trying to define what bodies exist by your expectation of what they must have. Deers don't need to be male to have antlers, humans don't need to be female to have breasts. For either to have a body, they only need existence of that body.
These are anomalies. Just like albino crows and six-toed cats.
Men and women with unmatched sex features are also anomalies called "intersex."
Transpeople are a totally different thing altogether. They are people with clearly defined sexes, i.e., not intersex, who are choosing a different gender.
Misreading my point, the so called an anomonlies are not the problem with this account of sex, although they are symptomatic of it. This account of sex does not work for anyone.
Bodies don't care what identity they belong to. They will be what they are. Antlers are antlers on male, a female or someone with no sex. So are breasts. The mistake of this account of sex is a category error. It's confused the existence of bodies with an identity category of sex.
Did you mean anyone or everyone?
I meant anyone, since I'm discussing the description of individuals. Due to being a category error, this account of sex fails in any individual instance it is used. It does not even work with cis people.
I don't know how you can feasible claim that. Most people match the standard description of biological sexes.
The failure is there is there is acually no descprtion. If you are dealing with the body, then the terms which describe it are that a body exists. To speak of this notion of sex does not.
It's not that there aren't people with the body parts expected under th is notion of sex, it's that sex isn't an account of them. Sex is describing a supposed identity (people with a body have this meaning of sex, male, female, etc.), not the body parts. (Which we see in how each body part is still has to be described on its own terms). As such, sex is not an account of what bodies are present, but one of what bodies mean in an identity of sex.
Of course there is a standard description, including chromosomes and sex organs. Most people match that description. Unless you have some scientific proof they don't?
That is the proof. Sex is not actually telling us about the body parts. We still had to use the body parts themselves to give a description of the body (sex organs, chormosmes, etc. ). Sex is doing no work in describing the body. It gives us nothing about body parts and we do not need it to describe what body parts are present.
Of course it does work. It tells us, for example, which person gives birth and nurses. And which person can't, simply cannot, do that. It tells us which two people together can make a child, and others that cannot.
"Arm" is a term to describe a constellation of smaller traits as well.
"Useless" and "inaccurate" are also distinct complaints. Being useless does not makes something inaccurate.
It absolutely does not. All these facts are given by what a body does. It's the breasts (Or not breasts! Breasts aren't the only possible state which might occur with someone nursing )and what they are doing, which defines who is nursing.
Sex does not. In this case, it is just our just-so story of who is supposed to nurse on account of the identity of sex. It doesn't even get those with breasts right: some of them don't nurse, some of them cannot nurse.
Which is why I would stay it is both useless (as it achieves nothing of value) and inaccurate (since it is a category error which makes mistakes about bodies). :wink:
Show me some proof rather than just assert it out of thin air. Show me how there is such a percentage of otherwise "male" persons who can nurse, without medical intervention, so as to make it more than just a random anomaly.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Biology is about can't and not about won't. And women who can't nurse are unable to do so for medical problems. (Or because the baby can't latch, but in that case the mother can nurse amd her biology is normal.)
Arm is a word and concept.for a specific different body part. It's not just a collection of traits. There are many ways traits of an arm might collected which are not an arm. There are also many different traits which may be collected in an arm (e.g. articfical limbs, robot arms etc.), which are not in a given in another (a biologcal human arm).
It is not used to describe a collection of smaller traits. Arm describes a distinct object of the body, wh8ch also has many smaller parts. (unlike sex, which names not a body, but an identity).
The arm is made out of smaller parts, without which it cannot exist. It can exist with some of those parts altered or missing, but there have to be enough of them present to constitute an arm. Therefore, "arm" very much describes the collection of smaller traits.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make here.
Quoting fdrake
That wasn't the problem I said that you have. Another problem you have is that you don't pay attention.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
You're not paying attention either.
If identities are socially constructed, then that means that they are identities that are given by others, or assumed by others, not by an individual by themselves.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No. I make observations and notice that many bodies share similar features and functions to the point where 99.9% fit neatly into two categories. There are anomalies in nature because natural selection doesn't plan ahead. What does it mean to be an anomaly? It means that you don't fit neatly into those two categories that 99.9% of others fit into. It means that you are a different category, not the opposite of one of the other categories. The fact that anomalies exist isn't a good reason to dispose of our categories or to be sexist.
.
Ok! How do you think someone gets an identity? Or do they just 'have' it from when they're born?
And how do you think someone becomes influenced by or involved with a social construction?
We already went over how one gets various identities. Your problem is that you are confusing biological real identities (being born with certain body parts and functions) with SHARED ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THOSE IDENTITIES. Shared assumptions are not identities that one can assume for themselves, but are identities that are assumed by others about the individual, and our assumptions about people aren't always accurate. Isn't this the problem of generalizing people and putting them in boxes based on how they dress? Isn't that the definition of being biased and sexist?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Oh I get it maybe, you think gender is about anatomical/natal sex, and not just influenced by it (as part of a complicated system of bodies and social processes)?
Wait. Waaait. You think a person's identity is just about what they think?
So just because I find this interesting. I take a naturalistic view on social construction. That might seem like a contradiction in terms, but it's quite a defensible thesis.
The general reputation of social construction is the kind of thing you'd expect to see on Tumblr or out of the mouths of over zealous social anthropology under graduates: "Morality is just a social construction!", without ever explaining what a social construction is, this 'just' is the operative word, not the 'social construction' part.
The general reputation of social constructions is that they have very little to do with anything material; this conception sees them as they're cultural artefacts, floating social facts, generated by the aggregate of individual assumptions and perception we have about shared practices. You can turn the causal structure on its head and get the same idea; the cultural artefacts and floating social facts generate the aggregate of individual assumptions and perceptions we have about shared practices.
You seem to want to situate identity in either of these conceptions; either individual identities partake in the generation of social conditions; as if they are prior to them; or social conditions partake in the generation of identities. You also seem to insist on a purity of definition, social constructions and identities and never the twain shall meet, based on your metaphysical intuitions about social constructions and identities.
In opposition to this, I see it reciprocally; people partially construct social stuff, social stuff partially constructs people. It's a blending on all levels; a reciprocal dependence that undermines any demand for their scission. There are points of overlap, and processes outside of the two.
I'd like you to bracket and articulate these assumptions so we can discuss them. We'd probably make more progress that way than talking cross purposes.
My point is that your account of sex is just another layer of these sexist assumptions. What does anyone any one need a penis to be a man, a womb to be a woman? Just as an identity is not one's hair or dress, it is not one's biological features either.
There are no "real biological idenities" because they fact of an identity is a different to existence of a biologcal feature. Such a notion of real biological identities are just another sexist assumption about about a body and how it belongs.
No, sexist assumptions are assumptions that have nothing to do with one's sex - like what kind of clothes you should wear and what kind of job you should have because of your sex. It is sexist to say that women shouldn't be able to join the military. It isn't sexist to say that women have vaginas.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
What does anyone need a dangling anatomy between one's legs that urinates and fertilizes women's wombs to have a "penis"? We don't need words to categorize the world. We don't need words to notice the similarities and differences between people. We simply need eyes and a brain. We only need words if we want to communicate those differences and similarities to other people. I don't need the words "penis", "vagina", "man", "woman" etc. to notice the similarities between certain body parts on different individuals and how others share different body parts, but there are only two groups. I don't notice anyone with a completely different body part than the two that I see on everyone. We don't have three, four, or even ten different kinds of sex organs. We only have two.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessThen why do people claim to have an identity of man or woman based on their style of dress and hair? You seem to be denying the existence of gender as an identity.
I've asked those questions numerous times and you're just now finding it interesting?
Quoting fdrake
You win a gold metal for the mental gymnastics, fdrake.
Quoting fdrake
I see the exact same thing of leftists throwing about this claim that "gender is a social construction", without ever explaining what a social construction is. It's why I've had to ask the question several times of you - that you are just now finding interesting. :brow:
Quoting fdrake
If social constructions have very little to do with anything material, then how is it that they influence our social behaviors?
Social constructions are ideas about the physical world. They can be expectations or assumptions of some physical person. We all have certain functions and limitations based on our physiology. When these expectations and assumptions begin to split from from those actual functions and limitations, they come racist, sexist, etc. They being to force people into boxes that that have nothing to do with their physiological functions and limitations, yet they are based on those functions and limitations. Saying that blacks are criminals because they are black is racist because it is an assumption about a person based on the color of their skin - their physiology. It is an illogical assumption because the color of one's skin doesn't make one a criminal. One's actions do, and one simply needs to point to all the whites in prison to show that one's skin color doesn't make one a criminal. One's skin color has nothing to do with being a criminal, yet their skin color is being cited as the reason for being a criminal.
The same goes for sexism. It is sexist to put men and women in assumed boxes based on their sex, yet have nothing to do with their functions and limitations as a particular sex. It is a social construction (and sexist) to assume that women need to wear dresses to be a woman, or that men need to wear pants to be men, just as it is sexist to say that women shouldn't be boxing, or shouldn't be joining the military, or that men shouldn't cry. These are assumptions based on one's sex, that have nothing to do with one's functions and limitations as a particular sex. So when a man comes along and claims to be a woman when wearing a dress, it reinforces those sexist assumptions. Why can't he just be a man in a dress?
Social constructions are shared assumptions - meaning that they are social, not individual feelings. They exist as shared expectations, which is to say that you and I both would agree on this expectation, not that we would both have different views, much less complete polarizing expectations. Different, or polarizing expectations would not qualify as a social construction. So for someone to come along and say that they assume the opposite - that men wearing a dress makes one a woman - they aren't sharing the same expectation as the culture they are part of. They are still making an assumption based on sex that has nothing to do with sex and is therefore sexist! So you can still be sexist without it being a social construction. Individuals can make up their own assumptions about people that differ from their culture, but that isn't a social construction. It is an individual belief.
A great example would be religion. Religion is a social construction and they vary from culture to culture. One religion claims that Muslims aren't true believers. Muslims claim that Christians are infidels. They assume the opposite thing, both of which are socially constructed, yet both are wrong. A Muslim within a Christian culture would assume the opposite of the social construction, yet their assumption is just as wrong as the social construction.
When a man claims to identify with the "identity" of a woman when wearing a dress, what they are calling an "identity" is an illogical and sexist assumption of one's real identity. It's not really an identity at all. It is an assumption, or an expectation, of one's real identity. Instead of agreeing with the sexist assumption, we should tell them that it is sexist and that it is okay to wear a dress and still be a man, and that it is okay to cry and still be a man.
Maybe we should just abolish the social construction that humans should wear clothes. :grin: Then "cisgenders" wouldn't have to worry about what's in someone's underwear. It would be plain to see. The expectations that we have of the sexes makes it easier for "cisgenders" to recognize each other before getting to the bedroom. Even gays have a problem distinguishing between men and women if men dressed as women and women dressed as men. So even though it is sexist, it is useful for most humans to recognize each other in cultures where wearing clothes are a mandatory, strictly enforced social construction. Abolish clothes and you are on the way to abolishing gender and sexist social constructions.
Actually no, not once in this thread have you ever asked what I thought a social construction is. I checked. There are no questions like "fdrake what do you think a social construction is?" or "how do you think social constructions relate to bodies?" or "how do you think social constructions relate to performativity theory?" or "how do you think performativity theory relates to bodies?", all of which I would've responded to just as charitably as your genuine question about what I thought.
What you've actually done every single time (and I've checked) you've used the term 'social construction' in our discussion, you've assumed that my account of them is the same as your account of them. And you've assumed that your account of the relationship of gender (when conceived as a social construct) to gender identity is correct. And you've assumed that your account of the relationship of gender expression to gender identity is correct, and you've assumed all of these things by how you've accused me of contradicting myself. You want me to argue on your terms, your unstated assumptions, that ensure everything goes your way. And you insist on this so much that you're committed to the belief that the UN has no freakin' clue what the definitions it uses mean.
What I've been doing in our discussion is challenging those assumptions of yours, which you have misinterpreted, or wilfully ignored, or characterised as irrelevant. If you bracket your assumptions above, you're way more likely to see my account as internally consistent.
My motive for bringing in the UN definitions is precisely to challenge the assumptions you made with a credible source. So let's go through your assumptions of how stuff works, now that you've done me the pleasure of actually describing how you think, albeit in a limited fashion related solely to the idea of social constructions.
Throughout this, it's important to keep in mind that there are lots of varieties of social constructions which behave very differently. "Social construction" is an umbrella term for any piece of social artifice. Their only points of commonality (as I see it) are that particular social constructions are the name of an entity (like "St. Johns' University" or "Google") or social process (like "baptism" or "driving lessons") that occurs as a result of or is constituted by (and these are inequivalent!) the actions, ideas and personal states of its constituents. Its constituents may also be other social constructions; like the different sub companies of a big one, or the different variations on a religious ritual, or the cosignatories on a treaty.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, institutions are social constructions and are not just ideas. We do not think the law into being, we must act and think together to bring it about. Corporate persons are not ideas, they are legal persons, which are social constructions in the above sense.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Not simply this, they can be expectations or assumptions expressed in a binding agreement between countries, like a treaty. Or they can be a hierarchical management system for a large company. The 'individuals' constituting or generating any given social construction need not be individual people at all even if they necessarily involve (individual partaking, co-constitution) the actions of people.
You've gone in two sentences and you've already missed a lot of the nuances of our social ontology.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is true, but one wonder's how Boris Johnson's spleen constrains his politics. Also see above points. This joke illustrates your all too hasty collapse of social ontology into individuals' bodies.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is garbled. 'Split from' how? How is it possible to 'split' expectations and assumptions from the bodily functions which generate them? Aha! I agree with you, composites of individuals acting together result or partake in emergent relational dynamics! Just like social constructions!
And... you think sexism and racism derive from the inappropriate having of opinions about bodies? Or simply that the opinions are no longer solely determined by bodies? Or... I don't even know man. I mean, what even is this? Racism and sexism because the... beliefs about (who believes, what do they believe about, where do the beliefs come from gaaarh)... bodies are... split from the bodies...
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, you actually believe it, sexism and racism are having ideas about bodies which are not solely determined by the bodies. Or rather than the bodies do not... reliably signal? a necessary... interpretation of... themselves... Yeah.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Wait. Waaait. You actually think this:
Sexism = any opinion deriving solely from sexed body bits.
Racism = any opinion deriving solely from skin colour.
I thought you didn't want to..
I mean, we're both going to agree that men are taller than women on average. And we're going to agree that this has nothing to do with expected skill of a typical man or woman in a technical field (I hope).
Perhaps you mean that a prejudicial belief induced by observing someone's anatomical characteristics cannot be based solely on an accurate appraisal of those anatomical characteristics in their relation to the topic of prejudice? IE, you expect a random man to be taller than a random woman drawn from the population of people on Earth, and this is not sexist because it's based on accurate statistical information about human bodies; but if someone expected a random man to be smarter than a random woman drawn from the population of people on Earth, this would be a prejudiced belief because the information isn't accurate. (Edit: This is completely artificial from how norms function too... expectations and passing judgements are not based on statistical information.)
Well, this isn't right either Harry. For obvious logical reasons; this criterion does not distinguish false beliefs about statistical properties of anatomy from prejudiced ones; but you're making a waaaaaay less benign error.
Your analysis is based on prejudiced beliefs rather than systemic injustices and systems of learning prejudiced beliefs. Perhaps if you focussed more on the latter two categories you'd see the need for social constructions; you know, when you've not rendered them irrelevant to the issue by fiat.
Edit: anyway, the talk about sexism is related to but distinct from the understanding of gender as a social construction, my keyboard warrior tendencies over-rode my sense of logic, sorry peeps!
You really were sitting on a mental dumpster fire here! It's a lot more entertaining now we've opened the lid, let's watch it burn.
No, I provided the definition of social construction from your source - Google. You provided definitions of "gender" as a social construction, but never clarified what you meant by "social construction", so I went to your source and provided it for you. You are contradicting yourself if you suddenly don't like your own source of definitions when it doesn't fit your convoluted sense of the relationship between sex and some assumption about one's sex. Remember that you confused the sex terms of male and female with your supposed gender terms of man and woman?
Quoting fdrake
Does the UN create social constructions for all the other cultures of the world? Is Iran going to use that same definition that the UN is using? The UN is a political entity, not a scientific one. This is a scientific issue, not a political one. That's part of your problem.
Quoting fdrake
The following isn't consistent.
Quoting fdrake
Quoting fdrakeSo, do social constructions involve material things, like people and their actions, or are they just ideas that stay in our heads?
I should clarify that my position is that the distinction between "physical"/"material" and "mental"/"ideas" is incoherent. Ideas are causal just as much as any action. So our assumptions can cause us to treat people differently, and not only that but they are also about the world itself.
Quoting fdrake
How does this address anything that I've said? We don't have shared assumptions about people with or without spleens. We have share assumptions about people with vaginas and penises. If we assumed certain behaviors of people that have spleens as opposed to those without that have nothing to do with them having a spleen or not, we would be engaging in spleenism, as opposed to sexism. So if we assumed that Boris should wear boots because he has a spleen and all others who had their spleen removed should wear sneakers, then what does your style of shoes have to do with you having a spleen or not? Is it okay for Boris to wear sneakers and announce that he feels like he doesn't have spleen when his CT scan shows that he does? Is it okay for Boris to announce that he is identifies with being spleenless when he wears sneakers? Doesn't that reinforce spleenism?
I already pointed out the difference between assumptions and expectations of others that are shared, which qualifies them as social constructions per your own source of definitions, and assumptions and expectations of others that are not shared - that are from the individual -and would not qualify as a social construction.